Search, social and connected TV: why connected TV is the next big advertising opportunity

Ask any digital marketer and they’ll tell you there are a few channels they can’t live without.

The first is paid search, which allows you to capture qualified users when they show intent and interest in your product.

Can you guess the second?

If you guessed social, you’re right.

With social advertising, marketers can leverage a wealth of targeting data to deliver ads to users who match their ideal audience, making them more likely to convert.

Both channels are crucial for any marketer looking to impact their bottom line.

What do they have in common? Well, there’s a lot in common.

However, for most established marketing organisations, these channels eventually reach a tipping point.

Sometimes, any additional budget spent just leads to diminishing returns.

For marketers who want to spend their budget and see a huge impact, they need to look elsewhere – and they need to look to connected TV.

Connected TV is the next great performance channel because it has the same core benefits as search and social. It comes equipped with:

Let’s take a deeper look at what makes connected TV an effective performance channel.

Connected TV is a growing performance channel

You can’t improve performance if you don’t have an audience.

Thankfully, people are changing the way they watch TV – and that’s good news for advertisers.

According to eMarketer, more than 195 million Americans will watch streaming connected TV shows this year. That number is expected to continue to climb as more viewers make streaming a more important part of their entertainment mix.

When combining the growing popularity of connected TV with its advertising capabilities, you have a recipe for success.

Connected TV is very different from traditional TV advertising; it takes the guesswork out of targeting and reporting. It combines the premium user experience of TV (i.e. relaxing on the sofa watching your favourite programmes) with the data-driven approach of digital advertising.

You can use first- or third-party data to target your precise audience, then track who saw your advert and what action they then took – whether it’s a site visit, conversion or any important metric.

And it all pays off through performance.

Based on a review of SteelHouse Performance TV + Audience Extension campaigns, we’ve seen significant performance on key metrics during 2018:

Connected TV is not only effective at engaging users to your website, it can also greatly drive conversions.

We’ve seen its ability to drive important metrics that can have a real impact on a brand’s bottom line – and it’s convinced us that connected TV will grow into the next great performance channel.

Connected TV is part of a true cross-device experience

Connected TV has proven to be effective in engaging users on advertisers’ websites and convincing them to convert, especially when a brand’s message is consistently top of mind across multiple channels and devices.

Ad recall is one of the strengths of connected TV – adverts shown on TV generate 32% more ad recall than the second-ranked device – meaning viewers are more likely to notice and engage with relevant content they see elsewhere.

SteelHouse Audience Extension was designed with this in mind.

It works as follows: once a viewer sees your advert on a connected TV, it automatically delivers relevant adverts to the same viewer across displays and mobile devices.

It achieves the one thing that is crucial for any advertiser – it delivers consistent and coherent messages that stay in the mind of the user wherever they spend their digital time.

Getting your audience to pay attention to your brand’s message is key, and audience expansion can help you achieve this double whammy.

If you’re looking to maximise your impact, be sure to integrate connected TV into your overall marketing strategy to complement your other advertising efforts and deliver a coherent message to your audience.

Connected TV is the third largest budget opportunity

It’s time to consider connected TV as a performance channel, because it is.

That’s why we created SteelHouse Performance TV.

It’s measurable in Google Analytics (and only through SteelHouse at the time of publishing), so you can measure it alongside other performance channels.

With SteelHouse’s fully customisable reporting suite, you can drill down into metrics like site visits and ROAS, as well as network-level reporting on who is seeing your ads on which streaming channels.

This level of insight gives you a deeper understanding of who is viewing your adverts where, and can better help you understand where your audience is watching.

Connected TV combines the experience of TV with the precision of digital – and that means a lot to advertisers.

Traditional TV has always been seen as a branding tool, but those days are gone. You can get reliable results with TV advertising.

We’ve seen results, and we’re excited to see more as we continue to create what performance TV means to the industry as a whole.

It’s only a matter of time before advertisers see ad streams on connected TV as the third huge budget opportunity.

TV has transformed into a performance channel – performance TV – which means huge opportunities for advertisers around the world.